Ecopoetry, Ecopoetics & the Life of a Water Poet

June 30, 2010

But l also wanted to respond to Benjamin a bit, just to amplify. It's easy for writers concerned with ecology/non-human nature to insist on a level of Truth that goes beyond responsibly informed engagement. In a poem of mine like "Flights of July," for instance, one might insist that the particular wasp identified, or that there really was a man up on a ladder. And while I did research on wasps, the man on the ladder was entirely fiction--but the proposed interaction between human and non...well, that's that sort of thing we're trying to understand. So maybe a real wasp in an imaginary carport? And, as Ben notes, there are things we don't know, like the daily lives of previous generations. So we guess. We use our imaginations to consider and engage. And now the bib (note that MLA now has you noting the format the piece comes in):

June 26, 2010

I
have a strange pair that worked together in my head as I composed the poems for
“Boomtown.” Yusef Komunyakaa underscored for me the need to continue to engage
with the very human context of culture. His poetry is steeped in an awareness
of and speaks back to the literary and mythological canon of many cultures. It
is instructive to note that his new and collected poems is titled Pleasure Dome. But his erudition does
not overwhelm the work. His
control of small narratives was also an inspiration, especially in the poems of
Dien Cai Dau. Because of poems like
“Jasmine” and “Tuesday Night at the Savoy Ballroom” I wanted more music in my
manuscript—songs from each of the eras I worked with—but there was only so much
time. The other poet whose erudition I paid careful attention to is Brenda
Hillman. Her book Cascadia suggests
that there are many different ways to grapple with place. Unlike any of the
previous poets, she works in a more, for want of a better word, experimental
vein. Her intellectual engagements are far more aggressive than Komuyakaa’s, and
I am not sure I enjoy her work as much. For example, her poem “Styrofoam Cup” uses
space and a total of fourteen words to suggest dismay over that nigh
indestructible artifact of the twentieth century (21). The experiment is
interesting, but it does not draw me in. However, her work did continue to
remind me that there are many ways to engage and explore place, and a strict
adherence to plain speech is not always required.

One
last poet kept coming to mind as I worked. Jimmie Santiago Baca pays careful
attention tofamily and place. In
particular, he describes intergenerational relationships so that we, as
readers, participate in a broader sense of what it means to be human, to live
the social lives of humans. Examples of this kind of focus include “What’s Real
and What’s Not” and “Family Ties.” In the former, two old friends take a
camping trip into the desert. The poem is about the relationship of the two
men, but it ends with “[w]e enter city limits, / and the torch my body is /
dims to old darkness again” (56); too much humanity degrades the spirit. And in
the latter poem, Baca feels “no love or family tie,” even when surrounded by
them (62). Still, when he heads out into the landscape, he takes his wife and
children. In a poem about the issues of land ownership, he finds his own family
calming. Throughout Baca’s work, human and non-human are fairly intimate:
animals, plants, and landscapes inform his poetry. But the nature that emerges
in the poems does not seem to appear as if by special arrangement. Baca engages
with nature in a way that lets the non-human act as itself: each actor has
their own mind and agenda. They follow their own whims, which the poet quickly
notes.

In
the end, I could not resist the power of the timeline in crafting “Boomtown.” I
struggled to find another organizing principle, but I am content with the shape
the project has taken. The book as it stands allows for a variety of voices, of
poetic styles, and, yes, of research into its pages. “Boomtown” connects a
broad sweep of history—both human and non-human—to the many lives and stories
of Lincoln, Nebraska. The book celebrates the sometimes troubling but always
interesting diversity of a small city born of imagination and desire, a city
that has managed to thrive despite having no real reason to do so. At each step
of the composition process, from research to draft to revision, I worked to cultivate
the ecopoetic principles I outlined earlier, and at each step the engagement
with a larger world, with broader contexts, led to interesting choices and
stronger poems. This project has convinced me that ecopoetry is a powerful aid
to the imagination and has the potential to offer substantial, important work
to local, regional, and global culture.

June 24, 2010

As I have laid
them out, three strands unify “Boomtown:” place and history, cooking, and
ghosts. All three, I believe, lend themselves to ecopoetic exploration.
However, the last section (“I Let Down My Anchor in the Land Around Me”) is the
part of the book that engages most clearly with the strand of ecopoetics that
insists on the phenomenological engagement and reportage that Scigaj, Gilcrest,
and Bryson (among others) look for in ecopoetry. This engagement and reportage
is a full-body experience of the world that engages the non-verbal parts of the
brain, an experience which is then available for writing. But even at the
moment of phenomenological engagement I am concerned, like Neil Evernden in his
book TheSocial Creation of Nature, with the ways that human life frames and
informs non-human nature (e.g., “At 27th and Capitol Parkway” and
“Storm Runoff”). It is a poor literary movement that cannot range across the
variety of human experience, assuming as I think we must that poems are meant
for a human audience. “Flights of July,” for example, explores the kind of
interaction with non-human nature that most Americans are likely to have in a
suburban (or perhaps even urban) ecotone: in the midst of some human-defined
task, a homeowner encounters a wasp. The non-human around us has found a way to
coexist, however uneasily that coexistence might be balanced. Poems throughout
the book—from “On Ancient History” with its deep historical sweep, through
“Wife Speaks” with her concerns about her environment, on to “Seeds of Victory
Ensure the Fruits of Peace” which ties the local garden to global events, to
“Boulevard Trees” and “Local Flocks” with their details grounded in nature, and
on into the last section—all these poems are unified in their exploration of
non-human nature. Thus, the ecopoetics of “Boomtown” relies on a variety of
contexts and strategies to build a book that in its individual poems might not
be immediately recognizable as ecopoems.

Leslie Paul Thiele
has two terms that I have found useful in considering this balance as I drafted
the book: interdependence (the notion that humans are webbed into relationships
with their history and future, with other life on the planet, and with other
humans), and coevolution (thinking and acting interdependently; that is, we're
moving forward along with these other relationships) (xxiii). What “Boomtown”
seeks to do with ecopoetry is to make explicit the coevolutionary condition. It
can be far too easy to forget or ignore the historical and non-human aspects of
the places in which we live. The demands and clamoring of our own desires, our
schedules, the quotidian, all of these easily command more attention than lives
at the margins of our awareness or than the events of fifty or a hundred years
ago. But those other lives, the non-human constraints of geography, the choices
of our forebears, all of these shape our choices and behavior. Ecopoetry
returns our attention to those issues. Reading ecopoems can help us to consider
where we are—however far away we might be from the setting of those particular
poems—in ways similar to how metaphor works: the tenor is not the vehicle, but
we understand each better when they’re brought together. “Boomtown,” then,
should have larger resonances beyond Lincoln, and I read Thiele as arguing for
“web” in a large, planetary sense.

In working on this
piece, it was hard to ignore the influence of Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, William Carlos Williams’ Paterson, and Muriel Rukeyser’s U.S.
1 (the first section in particular). This manuscript bears witness to the
strategies all three employ, but “Boomtown” differs significantly from all
three. Both Paterson and the salient
section of U.S. 1 have much longer
poems (and a much higher degree of interpolation from other sources), though
each book breaks up easily into smaller divisions. I also kept returning to Gary
Snyder’s Danger on Peaks, which
offered the structural idea of small poems revealing aspects of a life, though
in my own book the life has become the history of a small city.

Somewhat
less obvious will be the influence of Arthur Sze. The poems in The Red-Shifting Web and Quipu offer a model for how poetry can
engage multiple topics, agendas, and registers both emotional and intellectual simultaneously.
Short poems such as “Syzygy” and “Oracle-Bone Script” move quickly through
these registers, but it’s in the longer pieces that Sze’s strategies become
truly important. His title poem, “Quipu,” uses couplets, cinquains, isolated
single lines, and tercets its nine sections to model the knotted record-strings
of the Mayans after which the poem is named. The first section seems to speak
to the strategies of his book with these lines: “And as a doe slips across the
road behind us, / we zigzag when we encounter a point of resistance, // zigzag
as if we describe the edge of an immense leaf, / as if we plumb a jagged
coastline where tides // wash and renew the mind” (27). The poem moves
fractally (movement patterns become leaf patterns become coastline) as it
explores the issue of conception and miscarriage. Throughout, the work remains
poetically interesting, intellectually engaging and emotionally compelling,
especially to me as I was writing.

And
there are other voices that murmur in the background. W.S. Merwin offered ways for
nonhuman nature to creep into and overlap with human life. I also struggled
toward his more relaxed, unpunctuated line as well as the relationship of that
line to the rest of the poem. A poem like “So Far,” with its neatly formed
cinquains is a good example. In that poem, the narrative of the newly hatched
gecko stumbles across lines much like the lizard itself stumbles across a floor.
The story is interrupted by brief diversions into setting and science (“a
species rare if not officially / endangered named for one man Rumphius”)
(85-86). While less driven by elliptical associations than Sze’s poetry, his
poems still range widely over a loose line. I was drawn to William Stafford’s
sense of the line, too, though with punctuation. I default to a very short line
of few beats, so Stafford offered a useful model. His “Traveling Through the
Dark” is the most famous instance, but a poem like “Vocation” that starts
“[t]his dream the world is having about itself / includes a trace on the plains
of the Oregon trail” (102) has five strong beats across a mostly iambic line.
The rhythm swings steadily, subtly, an effect I was trying to emulate in “At
Play with Such Fervor, Such Strange Feelings” and “At 27th and
Capitol Parkway,” among others. The influence of both Merwin and Stafford reverberate
throughout “Boomtown.”

Like
Stafford, Sandra Alcosser writes her body on to the page, a practice which
moves her close to the phenomenological ideal that Scigaj and other critics
admire. While I have not consulted her other work much (though there is much to
admire in Except by Nature), the idea
of the body remained important to me. Characters in “Boomtown” are, mostly,
embodied, with the obvious exception of the ghosts. Lastly, while the first
section of her book is set in Louisiana, the second section offers details from
her life growing up in South Bend, Indiana, and the last section is filled with
explorations of non-human nature (in poems like “Spittle Bug” and
“Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel”). Her interest in the natural world makes her
an obvious model. Although not writing about the Midwest, A.R. Ammons allows
nature a kind of place in his poetry that is hard not to admire. In particular,
I am delighted by how nature appears in quite familiar settings. For example,
from “The Imagined Land” we read that “I want a squirrel-foil for my martin
pole” (260). He brings in the language of science, too, as well as the quick,
easy rhythms of informal, spoken English.

June 23, 2010

In response to
these difficulties, I followed other trails, all similarly conventional. The University
of Nebraska library had good holdings. I interviewed Ed Zimmer, the city architectural
historian. But I ran into another blank wall when contacting Jon Roth, a local
author whose book Lincoln Looks Back
had just been published. While I had several email exchanges, Facebook message
exchanges, and several voice mail exchanges, he proved impossible to meet.

Inevitably, the
project changed. While I stayed with the idea of my walk to and from the
office, I developed characters from the early history of Lincoln to pull
together otherwise disparate threads. My greatest disappointment with the
closing off of my more open-ended research strategies was the clear limitation
of possible surprises, rediscovery, and recovery. The history that was
available in published resources was still interesting, but the silences were
overpowering. In the end, my choice of topic and material were shaped by my
experience as a researcher.

Science, however,
was very available. I relied on several publications to sort out native and
non-native plant and animal species, which led to some interesting poems. In “Judges
9:45,” which is set sometime in the early 1970s, I explore the native plants
that lived in the salt marshes west of Lincoln before the marshes were drained.
I return to the saline area in “O Salt Creek Tiger Beetle,” a poem that brings
together biological details of the beetle, cultural resonances of salt, history
(the role of salt in the Lewis and Clark expedition), and other practices
involving salt. The sciences let me explore the idea of geologic history and to
keep that long perspective in mind while I worked. While there are political
and economic ways to understand the Great Plains and Midwest, the disciplines
of geology, biology, botany, and others offer perspectives that, while mediated
through culture and science, allow for more a more detached understanding of
the place and its landscape.

The sciences are
also at the heart of ecopoetics. Glen Love, in Practical Ecocriticims, encourages people “to keep finding out what
it means to be human” (6) and suggests the bioregionalism and ecotones might be
some of the useful ideas to explore (31-34). Douglas Reichert Powell argues in Critical Regionalisms that regions can
help to explore “how spaces and places are connected to spatially and
conceptually broader patterns of meaning […] critical regionalism can be a way
to assert what the relationships among places should be” (4). Science is a
product of culture even as it struggles to articulate raw facts. I have connected
the events and people of the book, of the city, to events and people much farther
away as well as to the biology and geology of the place.

As I went along, I
realized that certain topics were going to be imposed on me. I had anticipated
the Dust Bowl, but I hadn’t considered Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann
Fugate. While I knew that the world wars were going to resonate, I hadn’t known
about their impact on the campus particularly. Of course, student enrollment
dipped during both wars, but the fact that barracks were built on campus during
the second war was new to me. The campus unrest that unsettled many colleges
and universities during the 1960s and early 1970s touched UNL in less violent
and cataclysmic ways than at other national campuses, yet that revolution had a
lasting effect on the campus environment, especially for women, as the old
model of the university in loco parentis
was dismantled.

From the
beginning, it was important to me that the place itself—the land and weather as
well as the nonhuman inhabitants—be a character in the collection. The land is
changeable, evolving along with the humans, sometimes because of the humans.
The place speaks as trees, as a salt basin, as part of the dust bowl, as the
various animals that appear in the book. Thus, a theme of environmental
degradation runs throughout the book, starting and ending with the salt basin,
first as a shallow promise and source of minerals in “Saline” and “Maps of
Imagination” and ending with the Salt Creek tiger beetle’s imminent extinction
in “O Salt Creek Tiger Beetle.”

The insistent
timeline seemed insufficient to me, however, as a unifying principle for the
project. Place is a useful category, strong enough to engender this book and
countless others, but I wanted to find other categories through which to
explore this place. Non-human aspects were useful—plant and animal life,
geography, etc—but I wanted a way to think about human lives that was not
entirely linked to consumerism (though those links are hard to avoid in a capitalist
culture). While visiting my former colleague Christine Stewart-Nuñez, I talked
with her about an assignment she had given her students: write in response to
recipes. I had liked Simon Ortiz’s “How to Make a Good Chili Stew” and seen
other poems that used recipes as either a starting point or as a frame (174).
So I began to look for recipes. I tracked down some recipe books in thrift
stores and found books on pioneer cooking and on edible plants in the region. I
transcribed recipes that seemed particularly interesting or that might have a
larger resonance across the project, though I had to abandon some recipes as
the project developed.

The recipe
strategy allowed the book to describe some of the various ethnic groups in
Lincoln (though only a very few and already I can think of other groups I’d
like to add) and to explore an important, basic aspect of life—eating. The
reduction of humans to their most basic needs allows us to think about
ourselves as animals, though animals that pass on a sophisticated culture.
Thus, the blood in several recipes operates as a fairly explicit metaphor for
family and intergenerational relationships. On a more structural level, the
recipes also let me signal changes in era and the accompanying technologies. Thus,
the recipes worked in a variety of ways, but Icould not initially find a way to make them work as social
commentary.

I also wanted
another layer of commentary that did not require my direct observation and that
would allow me to explore concerns outside my own. I decided that ghosts might
work as commentators. The idea of ghosts certainly isn’t a part of
ecocriticism, but I agree with Dana Phillips and David Gilcrest that fictional
elements can allow a better understanding of nature—and, by extension, I will
argue, place. I chose as my ghosts three early, important, figures: Mary Monell
(who came to Lincoln in 1869, started the Universalist Church here, and hosted
the first garden party in the city), John Prey (one of the first European
settlers in the area), and Standing Bear (a Ponca chief from the region who
successfully argued for Native Americans to receive legal status as people;
though he’s not from Lincoln, one part of the Ponca tribe is headquartered on E
Street near my home). I have borrowed some basic aspects of their personalities
(i.e., John Prey’s impulses toward trade and exploration, Mary Monell’s
progressivism, and Standing Bear’s concerns for people and land) to allow their
ghosts to comment on the developing history of Lincoln.

June 22, 2010

The dissertation is done, defended, and filed. The introduction will be lost, so I thought it might be fun to post it up in chunks here. There's been an expanding interest in ecopoetics, and though this intro isn't particularly transcendent, I hope it might be useful for someone. So, here goes. Chunk number one:

Ecology
of a Boomtown

The project that
is now “Boomtown: A Prairie Capital” began in the fall of 2005. As I read and
explored various critical voices in Thomas Lynch’s ecocriticism class—many of those
readings would become formal entrants into my comprehensive examination reading
lists—I became convinced that my dissertation project should engage
ecocritically with my local environment. That decision was easy to make, but
initial conditions are a strangely sensitive group of phenomena and it took some
time for the project to develop.

On my long walks
to and from campus, I considered the class readings (including critics like Lawrence
Buell, Glen Love, Dana Phillips, and collections like The Ecocriticism Reader, among others), ideas about how the “local”
in “local environment” is constructed, and the poetry I might explore. I still
didn’t have a good sense of what shape the project should take, so the summer
after Lynch’s class, I organized a dérive—a
walk that adds chance operations to a stroll through the city. I generated a
lot of material during that afternoon, and as that walk came to an end, I
noticed—not for the first time, but with more focus—a bronze historical marker
on the side of Sandy’s bar at the corner of 14th and O Streets. The marker
notes the site of Luke Lavender’s cabin, perhaps the first wooden building
built in the area.

As I took a seat
at Yia-Yia’s, a local pizzeria, to wait for the rest of the dérive participants, I realized that I
had my topic: the daily, two mile walk to and from my office. The areas I moved
through included early neighborhoods, the grounds of the capitol, and the
university campus itself. I became convinced as I began the project that I—the
Romantic subject—was less and less interesting. This conviction was not a
question of self-esteem; rather, it came from my developing ideas about
ecopoetics. The pastoral, the ramble, the clichéd “solitary in the woods
epiphany” poem—all seemed to have the Romantic “I” attached, and the I who was
engaging with this project wanted to find a different position from which to
explore place. Also, my conviction that I lived in nature, even in this small
Midwestern city of 250,000, lead me consider a different subjectivity, a
subjectivity that—at least in the poems—opened up to include other voices,
other circumstances, a subjectivity that draws attention away from the poet.

Throughout the
project I have wrestled with the idea of what it means to write ecopoetry,
environmental poetry, or however any number of critics care to describe a
poetry influenced by place and nonhuman nature. In order to ground the rest of
the discussion of “Boomtown,” I am going to review briefly the positions and
critics most central to the project and compelling to me as a poet.

Joni Adamson is
one of the first and most persistent voices informing the writing of this
project. In American
Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism:The Middle Place,
she insists that ecologically informed writing needs to expand beyond
the nature ramble and return to the local. This insistence is certainly at the
heart of what I’m after in moving beyond the Romantic “I” and understanding
place. However, “Boomtown” does little to address environmental justice, though
the book takes up questions of race in poems like “Recipes You Need,” “The
Parks Are Closed,” and “Images of Native America.”

But not every
critic demands activist speech. Leonard Scigaj, one of the very first people to
use the term “ecopoetry” defines it as a poetry that has an awareness of the
limits of language, a poetry that is engaged with processes of perception,
considers how perception “welds” subjectivity to the world, maintains the
natural world as equal and separate, provides models of behavior, challenges
anthropocentric views and encourages biocentrism (xiv). Further, he argues that
ecopoetry can help other people re-imagine their relationship to the world
(xiv). It was this re-imagining that I had in mind as I moved away from the
Romantic “I.”

David Gilcrest, while
using the term “pragmatic environmental poetics” instead of “ecopoetry,” calls
for poetry to be “pragmatic in its engagement with the world” (113). It “makes
room for nonhuman alterity as it compensates for the vicissitudes of symbolic
action. It is successful to the extent that it is responsive to both. The best
environmental poetry thus reorients our relationship to nature and to language”
(113). Later, he notes that such a poetics “acknowledges, either implicitly or
explicitly, the limitations that human perception and language place on mimetic
ambitions” (123). By writing the history of a city, however, I am foregrounding
the history of humans in that place. Yet “Boomtown” turns from solely human concerns
and argues implicitly (as early as “Ancient History” and “Uncarved Creek”) that
those concerns can be understood—indeed, should be understood—as being intimate
with the non-human. Even in a city.

Gilcrest turns to
Leonard Scigaj and the latter’s idea of référance.
I have not written, for the most part, about an “unmediated experience of the
living world” (Gilcrest 136), nor do I completely understand what it might look
like on the page, given the levels of cognition and shaping that go into the
work of a poem. Nevertheless, my daily trek through the city allowed me to
engage with the environment in ways that were very different from my research,
which was necessarily text- and photograph-based.

Scott Bryson, in
the introduction to his anthology on ecopoetry, defines ecopoetics as going beyond Romanticism, engaging an
interdependent world, expressing a humility before nature, and is skeptical of
hyperrationality (5-7). Later in that collection, Bernard Quetchenbach argues
that there are different kinds of ecological awareness, including place,
region, and bioregion (249-53), categories that were important to the
development of this book and that are expressed in the final selection of
poems. As an example, the animals and plants in the early poems “Uncarved
Creek” and “Legend of the Founding” (native species) are in direct contrast to
the animals and plants in the late poem “Exotica” (species introduced by
European immigrants).

I had a lot of
voices telling me what I needed to keep in mind, but at this point, my project
was still rather formless, so I turned to books by John Lane, Rita Dove,
William Carlos Williams and William Least Heat Moon—books that looked at place
and history carefully—to help me to consider a structure. I wanted to find some
unifying moment or character that would let me build the book in a less linear
direction than a simple timeline and that would let me reach beyond the limits
of my route.

Research, however,
proved difficult. The first barrier I faced was the Nebraska State Historical
Society. While their online resources were useful, their facility—with its
extensive collections—was closed for renovations during most of my project.
They reopened almost exactly one month before the project was due.

At the beginning,
though, I still had hope that I could use their resources. The website said
that the Historical Society collections remained available, but the use of them
needed to be arranged by email. So I contacted the Society. It became clear
almost immediately that the style of research employed by poets (and perhaps
other creative writers) is different from historians or genealogists. I ran
into this loop quite a bit:

“I’m looking for
information about the history of Lincoln.”

“Excellent. We
have extensive material.”

“Good! Could you
suggest something?”

“Certainly. What
are you interested in?”

“The history of
Lincoln.”

“Can you narrow
that down?”

“Not yet. I’ll be
able to narrow it down when I have more information.”

“Excellent. We
have extensive material.”

I can’t quite
decide if I had a chicken-or-egg problem or a who’s-on-first problem. The
project—and I think this is true for writers generally—required me to sift
through a lot of material in order to find stories, people, situations, etc.,
that suggested drama or offered revealing detail or brought seemingly
unconnected strands together. I had a broad vision that I was interested in,
and so I couldn’t offer the Society much of a topic. In a sense, I needed to
put myself in the path of inspiration. I should note here that “inspiration” in
this case turns on a very different conception of the word than the Romantic
conception of the word. I mean here the sort of insight that comes from paying
close attention to the information that comes from research (and there are many
different kinds of research). I resist the Romantic notion of a genius turned
inward toward a disembodied muse driven by the writer’s own passions.